Just Drive
by general zero
Summary: Wannabe-police detective Danielle Harrison is just trying not to piss off the police chief and ruin her chances for a promotion. Too bad the precinct's "ghost patrol car" is making it very hard to do so. And that's before she finds out about alien robots... [Gen, OC, AU!BarricadeisAlive]


**Notes:** Hiya! Enjoy and please review.

Rated for light swearing and canon typical violence.

Disclaimer: I do not claim any ownership or creative credit for Transformers.

**fic may be up for adoption, I know next to nothing about this fandom**

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 **Chapter 1-The Road to Detective**

Danielle Harrison knew she was never going to be a detective. It was a fact, however much the young woman had wished it otherwise. Danni was a very astute girl, and an excellent officer, but she was missing a very crucial aspect of a detective's temperament: prudence. The fiasco in Mission City was enough to prove that, and since her old commissioner had been kind enough to leave a very vague but none the less damning note about it in her official record, Danni knew that her new superiors wouldn't trust her enough to let her overcome that stumbling block. Not until she was old and grey, anyway.

So Danni remained an officer. Pitied by her contemporaries and held up as a negative example to the newbies, she was the perpetual traffic cop. Whenever she so much as suggested a new assignment to the captain, she was sharply reminded that she was lucky to have the job she did. Slowly but surely, Danni began to grow jaded. When she was very little, she had wanted to be a princess, a doctor, all those typical child things; but when she was thirteen Mission City was attacked by terrorists, and Danni knew she wanted to be just like the heroes in the military who saved the day. Her resolve only strengthened as vague news about more terrorist activity in the Middle East surfaced in the next several years. She was well aware that the military didn't let women enlist for combat positions, so she settled for the police force. She was going to be a detective. She was going to catch the "bad guys" even before they had a chance to blow up a city. Of course, her reasons matured as she did, but her enthusiasm refused to die. Occasionally, as with the Mission City mess right after she joined the force, it got her in trouble.

Drab, meaningless months of traffic duty, however, wore away at the edges of her idealism. She started to shirk non-essential duties, calling in "sick" and ticketing jaywalkers just to find something to do. Her mind was toying with the idea of giving two week's notice when a miracle happened.

A new captain transferred in. Being the new guy, he was stuck with her and a few other mediocres. This didn't discourage him in the slightest. Tall and squarely built, with a stubborn, persuasive face, Harry Blane was determined to climb the departmental ladder. Surprising everyone but himself, he did, not through department politics, but through sheer unstoppable diligence. What shocked the most, however, was that as he climbed the ladder, he seemed intent on dragging all his subordinates up with him.

It was a bumpy ride. Blane was kind but not patient, and seemed to assume everyone had the inexhaustible energy he did. It got to the point that other captains would send slacking officers to Blane's division for brief "retraining" and have them returned, thoroughly exhausted and ready to appreciate their superiors' more sedate delegations. Blane's regulars got no such relief, but there were perks. The most cited one was that Bane's officers were safe from office politics. It was a prevailing habit within the department to snag any passing officer of lower rank when a task needed attention. On the other hand, nobody but Blane gave his people orders; even the commissioner was forced to go through him first. Needless to say the commissioner did not appreciate this; he did not seem to appreciate Blane at all, but it did not matter, because the commissioner's superiors appreciated Blane. This meant, as those more experienced with department politics translated, that Blane had government connections.

The perk Danni enjoyed the most, however, was that Blane paid the marks on her record no mind. When he had first joined the department, he had sat each of his officers down and told them what was what. Samantha's briefing had gone something like this:

"Harrison, I've heard that you're reckless and unreliable. You record even says so. The commissioner says you think you're some kind of Dirty Harry that can get away with whatever you want."

Danni had felt her fists clench, seized with the injustice of being judged once again, and repressed the hot lump threatening to form in the back of her throat. Then she had realized he wasn't done.

"Everything on your record is very impressive, aside from your rec letter. Your aptitude scores, in particular. You look like you're on track for a detective slot. And then we have the rec letter."

Danni sighed. It always came down to the rec letter.

"From the rather vague report here, I'm inclined to assume this Mission City thing was more you pissing off your commissioner than you endangering you fellow officers."

Danni's heart skipped a beat as she realized what her new boss had just said.

"That does not mean," he continued in a rather sharper tone, "that I will tolerate any real or perceived impulsiveness on your part, Harrison. There is a very fine line between trusting your gut and getting a bullet in it. Understood?"

Danni had understood. Almost overnight, Officer Harrison transformed from a sullen, disillusioned rookie into an enthusiastic, skilled professional. She was nowhere near the best on the force, mainly because she never managed to shake quite all of that impulsive rookie attitude, but Danni never made the same mistake twice. If she nevertheless made quite a few mistakes, and if the captain's last statement continued to remain a constant theme in their conversations, well, she was only human.

Danni found herself part of the team. No longer was she excluded from the department's traditions and superstitions. She even helped to found the New Year's Eve "prank the captain" custom. It was deliciously funny, and Blane was a good sport about being covered in black paint. Danni loved the traditions, but she didn't have much use for the superstitions. Witness room four, for example, was never used because reputedly no witness interrogated there was ever convicted. Danni thought it was just a waste of space. Especially when it meant that she had to stand and wait with a suspect until another room opened up on crowded days. Likewise, when she came storming into the station after another patrol car had viciously cut her off, she was disinclined to believe her friends' explanation that it was a "ghost car."

"It's true, chica. _El Coche Embrujado_ has been around for almost six years. No one has ever seen the driver. Some say there isn't one; some say it is _el Diablo_ ," said her partner in between huge bites of some disgustingly pink Mexican pastry. Ruben was even shorter than Danni was, and was way too fond of making her try spicy ethnic food, but he was a soothing contrast to the recklessness which still occasionally seized Danni. He was also a crack shot, and not liable to lose his head when things did go south.

"Dre, Kelly, please tell me this is just more of his Spanish voodoo crap," Danni entreated her two other friends, leaning up against their own patrol car in the parking lot outside the station. She was almost to the point of asking Blane to look up who was assigned to unit 643, but the Captain had been hinting about a big project to come and the chances of receiving "prep work" for it were high if he caught sight of her. This was a large reason why she and her three friends, also under Blane's command, were eating lunch out in the parking lot.

Kelly grinned, her large teeth glowing against her dark skin, and shook her head. "There isn't a police vehicle anywhere in LA with the designation 643. You should be nicer to Rube, darling. One day all his 'voodoo crap' will come true. Besides, if you're seeing a car that doesn't exist, do you really think it's a good idea to be criticizing Ruben's sanity?" The woman's thick Boston accent almost obliterated the r's, but Danni was used to it.

" _Sita Kelly,_ have I ever told you how beautiful you are? Absolutely _perfectissimo._ "

"Many times, Romeo. Don't get any ideas. Just because I sided with you does not mean I'm looking for a ring."

Ruben grinned wickedly. "Ah, but _chica,_ I have the most beautiful one picked out…"

"Can we get back to the fact that a ghost car can't be real?" Danni interrupted. Ruben shrugged and attacked the last of his pastry. Andreas, Kelly's partner and the most senior of their group—and therefore the voice of sanity—shrugged also.

"Nobody knows where the car comes from. It's there one moment and gone the next. We get calls sometimes about a patrol car harassing pedestrians or taking Memorial Drive at a hundred twenty, too. It's just one of those mysteries. Everyone in the department sees it at some point or other."

"Seriously? Are you really telling me that I flipped off the Satan's cruiser?"

"Well, darling, you do tend to accumulate a lot of bad luck. Probably something to do with leaping before you look."

Ruben lowered his voice in a mocking imitation of Blane, Spanish accent making it more a parody than anything else. "Remember, there is a very fine line between trusting your gut and getting a bullet in it."

Danni rolled her eyes as Kelly and Ruben cracked up. "Great. You idiots should go to Vegas. I can see it now. 'Greatest Show on Earth: Comedian Cops.'"

"Oh Danni, one thing," Dre said, "Don't talk about the car to any reporters. Not kosher. Department secret, and all that."

"Now I'm involved in a government cover-up, am I?"

After that Danni started to notice the mysterious patrol car around the city. At first, determined to discover its mysteries, she followed it. The blasted thing seemed to disappear at an instant's notice, however, and eventually Danni gave in to the status quo and accepted the haunted car as a fact of life. She had more important things to worry about. The road to "Detective Harrison" for example, which still seemed impossibly long. Then Blane dropped the new project on them, their biggest yet: a serial killer on Memorial Drive. Technically, the detectives were working on it, and Danni, Kelly, Ruben and Dre were simply auxiliary support. They were not supposed to track down the suspect until the chief's detectives gave the say so. Danni, as usual, had better ideas.

It wasn't as if she intentionally disobeyed orders. She hadn't meant to have an epiphany. It just happened—the killer's pattern "clicked" suddenly, and Danni was off to arrest him before she remembered that she was both off duty and unarmed. When she did, she resolved to take a look around and then head straight to the station for back up. She even texted Ruben about it. She definitely didn't mean for it to go sour.

He crept up behind her as she scouted out his apartment building from a deserted parking lot. Whether or not he realized she was after him or whether he couldn't resist a target so close to home, Danni didn't know, but she caught him out of the corner of her eye just soon enough to dodge the crowbar he was wielding. Not soon enough, however, to avoid being knocked to the ground as he barreled into her.

She was screwed if she stayed on the ground, she knew. Danni had two disadvantages in a fight (small, clumsy) that could only be equalized by her gun, which was right there on her hip, so close, and yet too far. The much larger man was close in on her; there was no room to move and she was much too occupied with preventing his crowbar from saying hello to her head.

Danni may have been crummy at being a big strong cop, but she was excellent at being a young single woman. After a few aborted attempts to wriggle away, she landed a solid kick to the killer's groin. Shoving him away from her as he cringed, Danni scrambled towards the busier street she had used to get here. She stumbled to her feet in a frantic run-crawl, hoping that the freak wouldn't dare follow her out into more populated areas. She had ruined everything. The killer would hide now, and she could neither catch nor arrest him.

The crowbar clipped her in the back of the head. The creep had thrown it! Danni's ears rang as she crashed to the ground once more, the hot tarmac scraping her face. The pain wailed in her head like a siren, though strangely muted. Groaning she rolled over. The creep was standing over her, crowbar back in hand. She was looking up into the sun, leaving her about-to-be killer's face partially blacked out from the bright contrast, but she could see something wet glinting on the crowbar.

The siren-like throbbing in her head was louder, but Danni found she could think clearly enough to order her fingers to grab her gun. Sadly, her fingers were not thinking clearly enough to follow those orders. The man raised the crow bar, bringing it swinging down just as Danni finally managed to get a firm grip on her gun. No time to draw. She flinched instinctively, closing her eyes as if they were a shield.

The man screamed. Between the sirens in her head and the strange rumbling that was suddenly all around her, Danni barely heard it. What really threw her for a loop was the distinct absence of crowbar in her brain. She opened her eyes to see a black blur rush over her, and she heard the killer scream again. She struggled to understand why she wasn't dead, thoughts moving about as fast as molasses.

Suddenly, Danni's mind snapped to clarity. The adrenaline kicked in again, reminding her that just because she wasn't dead yet didn't mean she wasn't about to be. She rolled to a rather ungraceful crouch, pulling out her gun while scanning the street for the serial killer and whatever intervening event had saved her. Both were about twenty yards down the street.

The sirens in her head, Danni realized at once, had been real sirens. The black blur had been a police cruiser driving right _over_ her and, presumably, into the serial killer. Instantly thinking of Ruben and her text message, Danni calmed. Help would be on the way. For now, though she had to secure the killer.

Ruben had the man literally pinned up against the wall of a warehouse with the bumper of his cruiser. It was a strange move, oddly creative for Ruben, but very effective. The creep _still_ had his crow bar, making Dan whimsically wonder if it was a fancy boomerang in disguise, and he was banging frantically on the hood of the cruiser. That wasn't good. One lucky hit and he could blow the car up.

"Drop the weapon! You are under arrest. Drop the weapon and put your hands on your head," Danni called out.

The man ignored Danni and continued to whack at the cruiser, wailing all the while. What a freak. Danni made sure her gun was trained carefully on the man before calling to Ruben to back down. The car's engine revved as it accelerated slightly, but Danni soon realized that it was not moving in reverse. The serial killer shrieked as the car's bumper squished his legs against the warehouse wall. A second later, Danni heard a sickening crack.

"What the hell, Ruben!" Danni dashed towards the car, the tinted windows stopping her from seeing if her partner was even paying attention to her. Her fingers had just brushed the driver side door handle when the cruiser jerked into reverse much more quickly than any other car Danni had seen. As it pulled away from her, Danni's eye fell on the unscratched hood. She was vaguely aware of the serial killer collapsing at the foot of the wall, as forgotten as the gun in her hand. Freezing in place, Danni scanned the side of the patrol car as it turned around and pulled down an alley, siren no longer blaring.

Its number was 643. It also had a decal in elegant black script, right where the police motto "to protect and serve" usually was. _To punish and enslave._

The sound of a metal on concrete drew some of Danni's attention away from the spot where the ghost car had disappeared. She glanced at the serial killer, who was attempting to crawl away with his crowbar. (Really? Still with the crowbar?)

"Yo!" She fired a shot into the wall above him and he froze. "Sit tight. Shut up. They can do your Miranda's in the ambulance."

Danni pulled out her phone and called Captain Blane. He picked up almost before the first ring finished. "Yo, Cap'n." Her voice was oddly blank.

"Danni! Oh my God. Where are you? Ruben got some text and he thinks you went after—but I knew you weren't stupid enough to—look, why don't you come in, okay? Everyone is freaking out. We've got half the force out looking for you."

Danni had one eye and her pistol trained on the serial killer and one watching the spot where the cruiser had disappeared. She couldn't seem to look away. It was as if the car might return if she took her eyes off the alley for even a moment. "Yeah, about that. I'm going to need an ambulance at Fortieth and Memorial for a man with two broken legs. Incidentally, I'm going to need someone else to give him his Miranda's and all that loveliness. I've kind of got a concussion. Or something. Could be worse. Anyway I would appreciate some backup."

"What the hell? Tell me you didn't—are you alright?—you actually caught—I'm going to kill you and then fire you, Harrison! And then I'm going to hire you so I can do it again. I swear I've told you umpteen million times—are you still there?—don't you dare hang up…"

Danni hung up.

Ruben was furious with her for weeks. Kelly and Dre berated her for being stupid, but they came around much sooner than her partner, especially after she regaled the three of them with the story of the ghost cruiser. Despite the longstanding department tradition, however, it seemed her friends' belief in ghosts was limited to those that were unsubstantial. Danni was out of the hospital (scrapes and bruises, minor concussion) in four days (three days too many, in her opinion), but she spent most of that time arguing with Dre over whether a ghost could break a man's legs.

The story spread throughout the department, and the final consensus seemed to be that the ghost cruiser had indeed made an appearance, but that it had merely scared the killer into hesitating long enough for Danni to break his legs with his own crow bar. To Danni's frustration, she was considered to be too concussed to remember it right. They acted as if she wasn't the person who actually was there! They also denied Danni's description of the creepy decal, until a rookie came back from a coffee run, chattering with excitement, and verified it.

Danni was treated to a very long, very loud and very vehement version of the "There is a very fine line…" lecture. Danni suffered patiently through this, only paying attention to the important parts—like "…the chief is fit to bust a gasket…" and "…the official story is that you broke the guy's legs in self defense. Don't worry; it probably won't come up in trial. We're too busy trying to get around his insanity plea. The guy's a raving lunatic…" and, most importantly, at the very end: "…you did good work, there Harrison. Putting the pieces together like that. Better than the commissioner's idiot detectives did, anyway."

"Thank you sir."

Blane grinned. "Look, off the record, I'm coming up to get deputy commissioner once Rowley retires, and if you lay low and play nice, I'll get you that detective slot. The commissioner doesn't know Rowley's retiring, and he won't have time to appoint his own choice if I get my request in first. You have to stay out of the commissioner's hair, though. Understand?"

Danni understood. Laying low might take some effort, but Danni was willing. The commissioner couldn't remain actively angry forever, and when he let down his guard, Blane would slip right into the deputy commissioner's slot. Blane would do it, Danni knew, and then she, Danielle Harrison, would be a detective.


End file.
